CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Irene Baxter had not read a Colleen Hoover novel until four months ago, when a woman on the sixth floor had let her borrow one.
Irene had always been a big reader, but she refused to buy anything from , and the last time she'd gone into a Barnes & Noble, she'd been appalled at how the entire back portion of the store had essentially become a mall with puzzles, games, vinyl, and toys.
So she had taken to going to the library again and, when the opportunity arose, borrowing books from others in the building.
When her friend and neighbor had passed along the Hoover book, Irene accepted it with polite skepticism and had fully intended to leave it on her nightstand until she found a dignified way to return it unread.
She'd finished it in two days. She was now on her fourth one.
She set the book face-down on the blanket and rubbed her eyes.
The bedroom lamp was the warm amber-tinted one she'd replaced the original with three years ago, after she'd started to find the overhead light too much by evening.
The apartment was otherwise quiet. Outside, Monument Avenue was just as quiet, its traffic reduced to occasional intervals.
She took a moment to let the quiet and calm sink in.
And in doing that, she thought of Neil. He had finally, thankfully, let it go.
The last proper argument about assisted living had been weeks ago now, and since then he'd switched to a different mode — groceries twice a week, brief check-ins, a question or two about her appointments.
He had his own life to worry about, and she thought he might be finally starting to remember that.
It wouldn't kill him to finally find a girlfriend…
or, more to the point, and if her instincts were correct, a boyfriend.
But giving up on trying to convince her to move had been the right call on his part. She would not have gone. She wouldn’t have argued about it any longer either, because she'd already said everything there was to say on the subject. Repeating herself further would have been beneath both of them.
She had lived in this apartment for twenty-one years.
She'd moved in the year her husband Martin had retired, when they'd sold the house in Henrico. It had been too big, and they’d wanted something simpler—and with a sense of community.
And lo and behold, there had been an opening at the Hargrove.
The ease of a building with a doorman and no yard maintenance was a reasonable trade for a bit of space.
Martin had been gone for nine years now, but she still felt his presence every now and then.
She still refused to sit on the left side of the love seat because that was his spot.
She wasn't ready to leave it. She didn't intend to be.
The three deaths in the building had unsettled her, of course.
She'd told herself that the two FBI agents making their rounds downstairs were evidence that someone was actually taking it seriously, and that had helped a little.
She'd declined to speak with the detective's people weeks ago because she hadn't felt she had anything to offer, and because she was still privately unconvinced that anything criminal had occurred.
Now she was less certain about that second part.
She picked the book back up, read half a page, and put it on the nightstand. Her body was deciding for her that it was time to wind down, regardless of what the story was doing. It was time to get to sleep. She pushed the blanket back and swung her feet to the floor.
She washed her face at the bathroom sink with cold water.
She took the two medications that needed to be taken with food and the one that needed to be taken without, which still struck her as a deliberately inconvenient arrangement.
She refilled the glass on her nightstand and turned out the bathroom light.
She'd started setting up the coffee maker the night before rather than in the morning, which was a concession she'd made to herself sometime last year.
It saved five minutes in the morning, and five minutes mattered more at seventy-eight than it had at fifty.
She filled the carafe at the kitchen sink and poured it into the reservoir, then measured out the grounds and fitted the basket into place.
Just as she finished this little act, a sound came from the wall near the doorway to the bedroom.
It was a low, brief shift, the kind of sound that registered more as a change in the room's atmosphere than as anything specific. Irene set the lid on the coffee maker and stood still for a moment, listening.
She'd heard it before. A few times over the past two months, she’d heard the same thing near that same section of wall between the bedroom and the kitchen, sometimes lower and sometimes a bit further along toward the baseboard.
She'd mentioned it to Hale twice. He had nodded both times with the thoughtful expression of a man who fully intended to forget the conversation the moment she was out of his office.
Hale was a good-looking man who kept the common areas immaculate, but seemed to have very little interest in what happened on the other side of residents' actual doors.
She suspected the building had a rodent problem it was not advertising.
She reached for her phone on the kitchen counter, already composing the call in her head. She'd ring down to the front desk, leave a message, and this time she'd follow it up in writing because apparently that was what it took with Conrad Hale if you expected him to do anything.
She had the phone in her hand when she looked up.
A figure stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom. A man. He was not quite in the light, and not quite out of it, and for the half-second before she understood what she was seeing, her brain reached for a rational explanation that simply wasn't there.
She opened her mouth.
His fist caught her in the ribs before the sound could form—a short, deliberate blow that drove the air out of her and bent her forward over the counter.
The phone dropped. Her hand shot out for something to grip and found the vase on the counter's edge, the one she kept with the small bunch of dahlias.
Dahlias, because Martin had always gotten them for her.
It went down with her as she fell sideways, shattering on the floor.
She was on her hands and knees and still trying to drag in a breath.
She reached blindly for the broken glass, for anything, and got one arm up before he was on her, his weight coming down on her back and driving her flat to the kitchen floor.
She fought. Her elbow caught something, she thought his jaw, and she pushed and twisted with everything she had left, which was not enough.
The linoleum was cold against her cheek. He was above her, and his hands were at her shoulders, and she got one more look at his face before the weight of him pressed down fully, his eyes close to hers and flat with something that had no name she could reach for.
She knew him. She had known him for years.
And that was the last thought she had before the darkness came.